A Non-Configurational Constraint-Based Approach

Adam Przepiórkowski

Abstract:

Ever since the advent of modern linguistics in the Fifties, propelled by
early works of an MIT linguist, Noam Chomsky (especially, Chomsky 1957
and 1959), syntactic trees have played an important role in
linguistic explanation. Different behaviour of different syntactic
entities has often been explained by their differing tree-configurational
positions.

The most general aim of this study is to show that the role of
tree-configurationality is much less important than often assumed, and that
various phenomena should rather be analysed with the help of other
linguistic mechanisms. In particular, this study deals with two areas of
syntax in which tree-configurationality is supposed to be directly
manifested, namely, syntactic case assignment and the complement/adjunct
dichotomy.

In both areas, we present formal syntactic accounts of the relevant
phenomena which do not rely on tree-configurationality. In fact, we argue
that, in both cases, configurationality-based analyses are at best
unmotivated, and at worst empirically wrong and untenable.

The main empirical basis of this study is Polish, a West Slavic language
with a number of interesting case and valency phenomena. Thus, most of the
empirical results obtained below will be of particular relevance to Slavic
linguistics. However, when developing the general approaches to case
assignment and to the complement/adjunct dichotomy, we will briefly look at
phenomena from other languages, as different as English, German, Korean and
Finnish, and attempt to obtain a cross-linguistically valid theory.